Tales of Neveryon (38 page)

Thus ‘the violence of the letter’ (a phrase given currency by Jacques Derrida in his book on the metaphor of ‘speech vs. writing’ in Western thought,
Of Grammatology
[Paris: 1967]) may very well have begun, to use Schmandt-Besserat’s words, with the clay ‘… rolled between the palms of the hand or the lumps pinched between the fingertips … incised and punched.’ Indeed, Derrida’s ‘double writing,’ or ‘writing within writing,’ seems to be intriguingly dramatized by the most recent archeological findings.

In Mesopotamian contractual situations, so runs the theory, these clay tokens were used to make up various bills of lading, with given numbers of tokens standing for corresponding amounts of grain, fabric, or animals. The tokens were then sealed in clay ‘bullae,’ which served as envelopes for transmitting the contracts. The envelopes presumably had to arrive unbroken. In order to facilitate the dealings, so that one would know, as it were, what the contract was about (in the sense of around …?), the tokens were first pressed into the curved outer surface of the still-pliable clay bulla, before they were put inside and the bulla was sealed. Thus the surface of the bulla was inscribed with a
list
of the tokens it contained. In a legal debate, the bulla could be broken open before judges and the true ‘word’ within revealed.

The writing that
we
know as writing, in Babylonia at any rate, came about from situations in which such double writing-within-writing was not considered necessary. Curved clay tablets (and the reason for those curves has
been hugely wondered at. Storage is the usual explanation. Schmandt-Besserat’s theory: they aped the curve of the bullarum surfaces, from which they were derived) were inscribed with
pictures
of the impressions formerly made by the tokens. These pictures of the token impressions developed into the more than 1,500 ideograms that comprise the range of cuneiform writing.

Bear in mind the
list
of tokens impressed on the bulla surface; and we are ready for a brief rundown of Steiner’s most exciting contribution, in many people’s opinion, to the matter. Steiner herself has written in a popular article: ‘Briefly, what I was able to do was simply to bring my mathematical work in Naming, Listing, and Counting Theory to bear on my archeological hobby. N/L/C theory deals with various kinds of order, the distinctions between them, and also with ways of combining them. In a “naming” (that is, a collection of designated, i.e., named, objects), basically all you can do – assuming that’s the only kind of order you possess – is to be sure that one object is not any of the others. When you have this much order, there are certain things you can do and certain things you can’t do. Now let’s go on and suppose you have a “list” of objects. In a “list,” you not only know each object’s name, but you know its relation to two other objects, the one “above” it in the list and the one “below” it in the list. Again, with this much order, and no more, you can do certain things and cannot do certain others. And in a “count,” you have a collection of objects correlated with what is known as a “proper list.” (Sometimes it’s called a “full list.”) A “count” allows you to specify many, many complicated relationships between one object and the others – all this of course, is detailed in rigorous terms when you work with the theory.’ For the last dozen years or so N/L/C theoreticians have been interested in what
used to be called ‘third level order.’ More recently, this level of order has been nicknamed ‘language,’ because it shares a surprising number of properties with language as we know it.

‘Language’ is defined by something called a ‘noncommutative substitution matrix.’ As Steiner explains it, a noncommutative substitution matrix is ‘… a collection of rules that allows unidirectional substitutions of listable subsets of a collection of names. For example, suppose we have the collection of names A, B, C, D, and E. Such a matrix of rules might begin by saying: Wherever we find AB, we can substitute CDE (though it does not necessarily work the other way around). Whenever we find DE, we can substitute ACD. Whenever we find any term following ECB we can substitute AC for that term. And so forth.’ Steiner goes on to explain that these rules will sometimes make complete loops of substitution. Such a loop is called, by N/L/C theoreticians, a ‘discourse.’ ‘When we have enough discursive (i.e. looping) and nondiscursive sets of rules, the whole following a fairly complicated set of criteria, then we have what’s known as a
proper
noncommutative substitution matrix, or a full grammar, or a “language.” Or, if you will, an example of third level order.’

N/L/C theory got its start as an attempt to generate the rules for each higher level of order by combining the rules for the lower levels in various recursive ways. Its first big problem was the discovery that while it is fairly easy to generate the rules for a ‘language’ by combining the rules for a ‘naming’ and a ‘list,’ it is impossible to generate the rules for a ‘count’
just
from a ‘naming’ and a ‘list,’ without generating a proper ‘language’ first – which is why a ‘language,’ and not a ‘count,’ is the third level of order. A ‘count,’ which is what most of mathematics up through
calculus is based on in one form or another, is really a
degenerate
form of language. ‘“Counting,” as it were, presupposes “language,” and not the other way around.’ Not only is most mathematics based on the rules governing the ‘count,’ so is most extant hard computer circuitry. Trying to develop a real language from these ‘count’ rules is rather difficult; whereas if one starts only with the rules governing a ‘naming’ and a ‘list’ to get straight to the more complicated third-level order known as ‘language,’ then the ‘language’ can include its own degenerate form of the ‘count.’

To relate all this to the archeology of ancient languages, we must go back to the fact that we asked you not to forget. Inside the bulla we have a collection of tokens, or a ‘naming.’ On the outside of the bulla, we have the impressions of the tokens, or a ‘list.’

How does this relate to the Culhar’ Text? Soon after Steiner made her discovery in the Istanbul Museum, a bulla was discovered by Pierre Amiet at the great Susa excavation at Ellimite, containing a collection of tokens that, at least in x-ray, may well represent a goodly portion of the words of the ubiquitous Culhar’ fragment; the bulla probably dates, by all consensus, from
c
. 7,000
B.C
. Is this, perhaps, the oldest version of the Culhar’? What basically leaves us unsure is simply that the surface of this bulla is blank. Either it was not a contract (and thus never inscribed); or it was eroded by time and the elements.

What Steiner has done is assume that the Missolonghi Codex is the ‘list’ that should be inscribed on the bulla surface. She then takes her substitution patterns from the numerous versions in other languages. There is a high correlation between the contained tokens and the inscriptions on the parchment discovered in Istanbul.

Using some of the more arcane substitution theory of
N/L/C, coupled with what is known of other translations, Steiner has been able to offer a number of highly probable (and in some cases highly imaginative) revisions of existing translations based on the theoretical mechanics of various discursive loopings.

Steiner herself points out that an argument can be made that the tokens inside the Susa bulla may just happen to include many of the words in the Culhar’ simply by chance. And even if it is not chance, says Steiner, ‘… the assignments are highly problematic at a number of points; they may just be dead wrong. Still, the results are intriguing, and the process itself is fun.’

Whatever other claims can be made for the Culhar’, it is almost certainly among our oldest narrative texts. It clearly predates Homer and most probably Gilgamesh – conceivably by as much as four thousand years.

The classic text in Western society comes with a history of anterior recitation which, after a timeless period, passed from teller to teller, is at last committed to a writing that both privileges it and contaminates it. This is, if only by tradition, both the text of Homer and the text of the Eddas. And we treat the text of Gilgamesh in the same way, though there is no positive evidence it did not begin as a written composition.

The Culhar’ clearly and almost inarguably begins as a written text – or at least the product of a mind clearly familiar with the reality of writing.

The opening metaphor, of the towers of the sunken buildings inscribing their tale on the undersurface of the
sea so that it may be read by passing sailors looking over the rail of their boats, is truly an astonishing moment in the history of Western imagination. One of Steiner’s most interesting emendations, though it is the one least supported by the mathematics, is that the image itself is a metaphor for which might be translated: ‘… the irregular roofing stones of the sunken buildings mold the waves from below into tokens [of the sunken buildings’ existence] so that passing sailors looking over their boat rails can read their presence (and presumably steer clear of them).’ In some forms of the token-writing, Steiner also points out, the token for ‘bulla’ and the token for ‘sea’ are close enough to cause confusion. Steiner suggests this might be another pun.

But if this reference to token-writing
is
correct, it poses what may be a problem later on in the Culhar’: at almost the exact center of the fragment there is a reference Steiner herself admits translates as ‘an old woman on the island, putting colored “memory marks” on unrolled reeds.’ These, incidentally, are among the tokens ‘reed,’ ‘old woman,’ ‘island’ that show up most clearly inside the bulla, though of course we have no way to be sure – from the bulla – what their order is supposed to be. Were there at one time two forms of writing? Or perhaps, as Steiner suggests, there actually was ‘… a “natural” writing, that came as an amalgam of vegetable and mineral pigments and vegetable or animal parchments, anterior to this Mesopotamian ceramic violence-within-a-violence, a writing in which the Culhar’ begins, a writing later suppressed along with “… the three-legged pots and the weak flights of the storied serpents [dragons?] …” that the Culhar’ mentions both towards its beginning and its end.’

Here are some further examples of traditional versions
of the Culhar’ with Steiner’s mathematically inspired emendations:

‘I walk with a woman who carries two thin knives,’ reads the second sentence of most versions of the text in at least half the languages it has shown up in. Previous commentators have taken this to refer to some kind of priestess or religious ritual. Steiner reads this (at one of the two places where her reading makes the text more, instead of less, confusing): ‘I travel (or journey) with a hero (feminine) carrying a double blade (or twin-blades).’ One has to admit that, weapon-wise, this is a bit odd.

The emotional center of the Culhar’, for most modern readers at any rate, is the narrator’s confession that he (Steiner, for reasons that must finally be attributed to a quaintly feminist aberration, insists on referring to the narrator as
she
) is exiled from the city of Culhar’, the city that names the text, and is doomed to spend his (her?) life traveling from the ‘large old roofless greathouses’ to the ‘large new roofed greathouses’ and ‘begging gifts from hereditary nobles.’ Steiner’s comment about the sex of the narrator is illuminating about her mathematics, however: ‘The highest probability my equations yield for my suggested translations is fifty percent – which, as anyone who has worked in the field of ancient translation knows, is a lot higher than many versions that are passed off as gospel (with both a small,
and
capital, “g”). Since the sex of the narrator of a sexually unspecified text is always a fifty-fifty possibility, I simply take my choice, which is consistent with the rest of my work.’

A phrase that has puzzled commentators for a long time reads, in some versions: ‘the love of the small outlander for the big slave from Culhar
ē
.’ Although here Steiner’s equations did not settle anything, they generated a list of
equally weighted possibilities (Steiner prefers the word ‘
barbarian’
to ‘outlander,’ and argues for it well):

1) ‘the love of the small barbarian slave for the tall man from Culhar
ē

2) ‘the love of the tall slave from Culhar
ē
for the small barbarian’

3) ‘the small love of the barbarian and the tall man for slavery’

‘It is even possible,’ writes Steiner, ‘that the phrase is a complex pun in which all these meanings could be read from it.’ Just how this might actually function in the narrative of which the Culhar’ fragment is a part, however, she doesn’t say.

Here are some other emendations that Steiner’s matrix equations have yielded
vis-à-vis
some of the more traditional versions that have come from other translations:

‘For a long time they starved in the greathouse after the women had eaten their sons,’ runs the consensus version from Sanskrit to Arabic.

Steiner’s emendation: ‘He starved in the greathouse many years after she had eaten her own twin sons.’ Moreover, says Steiner, the antecedent of
He
is none other than our tall friend from Culhar
ē
.

‘… the dream[ing] of the one-eyed [boy/man] …’ All translations agree that the one-eyed substantive, who, in the last half of the text (for reasons probably given in some section now lost) seems to replace the barbarian, is male. But Steiner’s mathematics leaves it wholly undecidable whether the one-eyed [man/boy] is doing the dreaming himself, or whether the dream is, in fact, somebody else’s dream about him – though all translations we have but one come out on the side of making him an oneiric figment.